On the Nov. 27 stop in Montreal of her Monster Ball tour, Lady GaGa was joined onstage by opener Kid Cudi. It’s somewhat obvious that this collaborative stage performance would occur — Cudi’s “Make Her Say” samples Gaga’s piano version of “Poker Face.” And it’s kind of funny to hear people in the crowd scream, “I knew it! I knew it!” when Gaga jokingly asks “who the fuck is on my stage?” as Cudi’s drawl is heard over the speakers.
Edited: November 30th, 2009
By Alex Massaad
Jamie Smith-Windsor has a unique story to tell with regards to human-technology interaction. Her baby, born over three months premature, was miraculously kept alive by a surrogate womb of ventilators, monitors and other medical equipment. She uses this heart-wrenching and emotional moment as a springboard to explore greater questions such as the role of motherhood in a technologically mediated infancy and the relationship between mother-daughter once technology takes the role of mother for medical, or other purposes. Does anything get innately changed in human identity from this technological help? Does the technology’s impact remain after the machines are disconnected and Smith-Windsor’s baby is moving and breathing under her own power?
In general the introductory paragraph has a kernel of information that supports the viewer with a preview of what is to come in the rest of the writing. In the case of Jamie Smith-Windsor’s article “The Cyborg Mother: A Breached Boundary” the best that I could find in the first paragraph was “Why not ask questions without answers, without presuppositions, causes effects, and linear time? Why not whisk yourself away from your comfortable position?” The comfortable position that Smith-Windsor is trying to latch onto is the concept of motherhood in cyborg culture. I only need to point to the definition of cyborg on the post a little bit below to reiterate that a cyborg is one who has their “physical abilities extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body.” Even if we were to ignore the second half of that quotation regarding the mechanical elements, Smith-Windsors infant has only extended her own human limits, but not human limitations in general. Her child was still in very weak health when compared to other children of the same age. It may be argued that this is a semantic difference between the infants human limitation or human limitations in general. I believe the OED definition specifically deals with the condition of human limitation rather than any individuals specific limitation.
It seems worth mentioning at this point, albeit slightly petty, that no technology was built into the body. All of the technology was external, with the exception of a tube extending from the ventilator machine to the lungs, and I seriously doubt that any of the machines were integrated into the infants conscious perception of themselves. Smith-Windsor is adding extra emotional weight to the role of technology in motherhood.
She is arguing that technology is displacing motherhood through its relationship to the child as described by Julie Kristeva’s infantile language. Here Kristava makes the point that an infant is incapable of seeing “other” or the distinction between the mother and itself. In Smith-Windsor’s case she is wondering if her baby is seeing a breached boundary between machine and infant rather than mother and infant. While I have no scientific research to argue against this point, she is imagining some sort of lost connection that would have occurred had the child been in her womb until the expected due date. I’m not sure how this would have transpired. Underneath our skin we immediately become more complex than the simple unified metaphor of the “self” that we perceive. We become infinitely complex, a bio machine that bears little resemblance to out outer-selves but shares quite a lot in common with a machine.
If we consider a baby in the womb as a human “on the assembly line” we can understand my argument a little more clearly. While the cells divide and begin changing into their genetically determined cells the infant is being “built.” The womb provides less sensory connection than would be necessary for any time of human connection. There is no light to see, hardly any sound to hear and only the boundary of the space to feel. Smith-Windsor’s infant would had any recognition of this space in the womb, and I don’t believe her time in the hospital incubator would have had formed any recognition either.
I strongly believe that there is no dispersion of an originally homogenous body, we are still whole. When the ventilators shut off and are disconnected Smith-Windsor is ready to take her child home and step into the role of mother. Her child doesn’t have a cyborg identity, the same way a newborn child does not wonder why all of a sudden someone turned on the lights (maybe they do and this is the source of their crying). My point is that the recognition process, and faculties associated with forming memories and comparing them, are too undeveloped to have a serious impact on an academic argument regarding the status of cyborg motherhood.
Edited: November 21st, 2009
By Alex Massaad
Donna Haraway is trying to push a point; permeating probably only the pedant.
Alliterations aside, arguments advance!
I always like to set up definitions at the beginning of my argument so I will begin with the OED definition of a cyborg:
cyborg |ˈsʌɪbɔːg|nouna fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body.ORIGIN 1960s: blend of cyber- and organism .
“A Manifesto for Cyborgs . . .” tries to create an ironic political “myth” that speaks to feminism, socialism and materialism. By melding the distinction between human and cyborg she tries to use the cyborg as the source of our ontology.
Her first point is hard to argue against, she says that the cyborg is both a part of our material reality and our imagination. While the fictional cyborg is a prominent figure in science fiction it is also starting to appear to be a possibility to enhance the human race. She is trying to blur the relational boundaries between machine and organism. The cyborg is both a fact of fiction and a nascent scientific/medical concept. For the last fifty years we have seen representations of cybernetic organisms in books, films and even comic books. Our society is beginning to consider the organic-mechanical synthesis through unconscious or conscious media representations.
While the Oxford definition posits a “hypothetical” status on cyborgs, discussions in Film 4002 have opened this up to include pacemakers, insulin pumps and even choclear implants, as these devices all extend certain human’s physical abilities. Wikipedia includes these human “modifications” as cyborg criteria. I would argue against this inclusion based on the definition of cyborg. All of this attempts to bridge the gap between fiction and fact for the cyborg. The medical enhancements do not function to “extend beyond normal human limitations” but rather to return these patients abilities back to normal human limitations. To my knowledge it is not preferable to receive a pacemaker or cochlear implant to enhance human performance. They are in fact still very risky and serious surgical implants. Nobody gets a heart operation in order to improve their athletic ability or to endure longer strain compared to their natural limitations. If anything, these operations reduce the patients natural ability. The same applies for cochlear implants. Some patients find it helps their deafness, while others find that the implant does not function as an enhancement. I still firmly believe that the cyborg, as envisioned in science fiction has not yet become a reality for our society.
The crux of Haraway’s argument rests on the statement that her essay “is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.” Haraway seems to extend this confusion to extend to women of colour. She tries to label this as a cyborg identity, but I completely fail to follow her logic at comparing a marginalized section of society to humans with mechanically extended physical abilities. By failing to draw an adequate picture of what a cyborg is Haraway does not manage to convince me of the relationship between cyborg identity and feminism as I understand them. This may be due to the abridged nature of the article, perhaps earlier sections address this. I disagree that these are compatible identities based on their shared status as “outsider identities.” We would continue to integrate humans that have medical enhancements, with unmodified humans with the same care that we integrate women of colour, or any other marginalized group into our society provided our societies’ political and cultural ideology continues to remain the same.
Edited: November 14th, 2009